Spiritual Dangers

Spring is Coming

Spring is Coming.

And with it our yard will be changing.

Settling the Estate

There has been a lot of change over the decades, and the past decade more than most.  Change, however, is not the same thing as progress.

If you're sympathetic to the plight of homosexuals in the United States, you've seen progress.  If you subscribe to a Judeo-Christian worldview there has been regress.  The idea of progress, the only way to distinguish it from just ordinary change depends upon a preconceived notion about where we are, or at least ought to be, going.

Then we have the problem of determining the data set you are measuring.

If you are a Christian, Yazidi, or just not radical enough of a Sunni Muslim in Syria, Iraq, or Lebanon, you would say the world is in a state of regress, regardless of how much progress American homosexuals have experienced.

Progress is a Judeo-Christian idea.  Made necessary by progressive revelation, a god who both keeps on writing and disagreeing with himself is the well spring of innovation.  Eventually it was decided this god had a plan and was moving his people toward that plan.
First the Jews, then a splinter group of Jews called Christians.

If we want to set aside a religious worldview and still talk about how to constructively approach the problems we face we'd be wise to apply the observation by economist Thomas Sowell, "There are no solutions, only trade-offs."

TANSTAAFL, "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch."  If you want to achieve change, there will be a cost, usually our ideology.  When we start talking soberly about costs and benefits we are taking a step away from unspoken pre-conceived notions of progress toward an ideal based on more romantic vision than reality.

Reducing global undernourishment is a goal, I hope, we can agree on.  Turning the world into a patchwork of small organic farmers is a romantic vision.  Returning marginal land to a wild state is a goal.   Humanity evolving into a peaceful vegans is a utopian dream.

That secular society has retained the mental habits of thinking in terms of progress but it gets in the way.  Christendom is dead.  Diversity of opinion is deeply rooted in our culture and the Tea Party and Black Lives Matter each have different visions of progress.  It is much more fruitful to talk in terms of individual changes we want to make in society.

Progress is not the only theistic idea to be retained in our secular present.  The idea of the apocalypse continues to make the rounds in one form or another.  One decade we're headed to an ice age, in the next, global warming will cause the oceans to boil, peak oil, Y2K, the population bomb, and on and on.

Yes, climate change is happening.  Yes some of that change is a result of human activity.  The idea that change will result in the apocalypse, however is a faith based jump and I have sat through too many arguments about the rapture to be easily sold; Al Gore's poetic attempt to pull at my heartstrings notwithstanding.

Getting a little greener each year.

God is dead, but we've yet to settle his estate.

Injecting theistic habits of mind into strictly secular debates serves only to make rationale discussion more difficult than it needs to be.

How does this figure into a blog about hunting, fishing, the natural world, farming, and food more generally?  These issues serve as well springs of pseudo-religious thinking.

 The anti-GMO crowd's continues to influence crowds as they attempt to universalize their faith-based food taboo.  Change from GMO could mean yields go up.  Combined with the decreasing rate of population growth this means fewer acres would be required to meet human needs.  Marginal acres could be returned to forest or prairie.  This would be good for carbon reduction, wildlife, rain forests, and the malnourished.  Instead we argue about food taboos and a romantic vision of what farming "should be" instead of what is, we listen to our fears rather than facts.

Because we assume technological progress is the enemy of nature we ignore evidence that land-based plant life is thriving.  The earth is greener now than it was when the first astronauts looked down upon the blue pearl.  This has happen because we have applied high tech to farming not in spite of it.

This is change that should be cause for rejoicing but it is a heresy in certain circles of foodies and environmentalists who put ideology before results.  The ghost of a moralizing god lingers in their arguments.  Their vision of the promised land obscures data that suggests positive change could be found in a direction other than their "one true set" of beliefs.

Global warming apocalyptic thinking leads to shrill calls to subsidize solar or wind power at its current immature state instead of allowing the technology to continue to develop until it is viable on its own. Biofuel nonsense continues to support the idea of ethanol additives to gasoline, tying up 25% of our corn acreage.  Acreage that could be used for soy, wood products, or returned to a natural state.

Apocalyptic thinking also leads the global warming debate to focus on mitigation instead of adaptation.  If we're not all going to die in some Cormac McCarthy deathscape, we'd better get to work adapting our coasts for higher tides.  But having become convinced that what we face is not change but the apocalypse, we're tied up in arguments about whether Canadian oil will enter world markets through the United States or it own Pacific Coast.

The ghost of the holy continues to haunt us but the first step towards exorcising that ghost is to recognize it when it disrupts rational debate.  By watching our language, we manage our thoughts.  We're living in the Anthropocene.  It is time we started acting like it.

Old Fashioned Pickles

Making chunks

My people hate to see produce go to waste so when my mother called and asked if she should bring some over-sized cucumbers up on her next visit, the answer was an automatic, "of course."  I had no idea what I was going to do with them.

A few years ago we started lacto-fermenting vegetables.  We never went into it in a big way, it was just something I did now and again.  Frankly, I ended up eating most of them and what I didn't eat went to the chickens.

Still we were involved enough that I bought a crock just for the process, and then we ended up not using it.  It has sat stored in our closet for years, until now.

The cucumbers were large, the kids have been gorging themselves on pickles recently, so I decided to make pickle chunks with them.
Keep in mind that I like my pickles with a little bit of a kick, the recipe was drawn from the book Wild Fermentation and went something like this:

Into bottom of crock place:

• a dozen peppercorns
• two pinches dried dill
• one palm of dried chili peppers
• a few shakes of garlic powder (to my shame we were out of garlic)
• a dozen green oak leaves (any source of tannin  would work to help keep the pickles crisp)

Pickles and brine drained from the crock

 Then I added enough chunked cucumbers to fill the crock and a salt water brine (3T salt for every gallon of water) to cover.

Prepare to be canned

Then I let it sit in the cool garage for about a week.  Most advice calls for the crock to be checked daily and the removal of any mold.  I was mold free until the last day when I brought the pickles into the house.

We ended up with more than seven quarts of sour pickles.  They were a little salty for my taste but they could be rinsed before serving.  We also decided to try canning what would not be consumed in just a couple of days.

I am sure they would have stored fine in the fridge but I wanted to see how they taste after the canning process.  I would like to do more of this in the future, if it looks like I can store the harvest well into the next year.

Each jar of pickles received one oak leaf and was half-filled with brine and tap water to the shoulder before canning.

About two weeks after canning the pickles I opened up a can.  They had lost some of that fresh crispness in the middle of each chuck but along the cucumber rind they retained a nice snappy crunch.

A wonderful experiment we'll look forward to expanding upon next year.

Some Friends actually are Food

Anthropology and psychology, like the other social sciences, can not help but be constrained by the culture and experiences of the observers.

By studying others we hope to learn about what it means to be human.  As often than not, however, what we end up doing is revealing our own provincialism.  In this recent article reviewing a study of cat consumption in certain of Madagascar, the provisionalism of this modern American life shines forth.

The researchers had hypothesized that because cat meat was not a preferred food, its consumption would be restricted to economic hard times. They were wrong. There was no evidence that people turned to eating cat only as a last resort when other forms of meat were unavailable. Rather, killing and eating cats seemed to be motivated more by sheer opportunity than necessity or a pronounced culinary preference. 

The researchers also wanted test the notion that food taboos are culturally transmitted. Thus they predicted that the towns would differ in the strength of prohibitions against eating feline flesh. This was technically true: for example, 10% of the residents in one town had a personal taboo against eating cat compared to none of the inhabitants of another town. On the whole, however, only 3% of all the individuals interviewed in the study were disgusted by the idea of eating cat meat. As the consumption of dog meat is widely tabooed on the island of Madagascar, the lack of prohibitions against eating cats is surprising.

It was once the case that the nation's cities were populated by the excess population of the countryside.  Farm mechanization created the extra labor which helped build our cities and populated the Chair's of academic departments from Veterinary Science to Shakespeare.  

Increasingly, however, those positions are filled by women and men whose closest connection to

2015: Some friends are food.

agricultural production is ever more likely to have been a grandparent or great-grandparent to whom they can not relate.  Consequently, they are spending research dollars on questions any farm kid of reasonable insight could answer.

What farm kids understand is that human relationships to the animals surround us do not fit into an easy trichotomy of the majestic wild, anonymous meat wrapped in cellophane, and pampered fur baby of a cat or dog but rather exist upon a spectrum from pest to companion. We care for our livestock and can be saddened at sending a favorite animal to market. 

Members of a single species of wild animal can be pest, food, a majestic animal to watch from the porch, depending upon the context.   Pets can be working members of the farm and contributers to the hunt who experience the real risk of harm in the process.  

They are not babies, they are members of a tribe or family, and membership comes with responsibilities as well as rights.

When I was seven it was time to butcher the goat that I had treated as a pet.  My mother was worried

1978: "Is it ready for the freezer yet?"

that I might be traumatized so a slightly older cousin was tasked to keep me away from the carcass until it looked a little less like my pet.  The cousin but my mother realized her concern was unfounded when i asked, "So, does it go in the freezer like this?"   At a young age I understood why we had cared for the goat. I understood sacrifice for the good of the pack. I understood that we had claims on the goat as well as an obligation to care for it. Over at the Huffington Post, these are foreign concepts.

To me, the biggest surprise of the research was related to how Madagascarans obtained their cat meat. Half of the time they simply ate the family pet. Cat meat was also commonly acquired in the form of gifts from friends. And sometimes cats were caught by hand or by trapping. In one of the towns, most of the cats were - gulp -- road kill. Hardly anyone had ever bought cat meat at a market.

They didn't buy their meat at the local Whole Foods! The inhumanity!


In hunting or farming, the writers over at Downton Abbey put the idea succinctly into the mouth of Lady Edith, “there is room for sentiment" in our relationship with animals "but not for sentimentality.”

If they had experience life with livestock, these anthropologists would be able to easily understand a culture where farm animals can be both objects of affection AND sources of protein. The culture of the Madagascar villagers is not the anomaly, but rather a culture where animals are either treated as unfeeling machines of production or surrogate children based merely upon their cultural-specific purpose.   When you live with living things, you learn to treat them all as living things. Where protein can not be taken for granted it is not left to rot along the side of the road.

I ate some roadkill last week. Is it more respectful to leave an animal to rot along side the road or consume it?

Color me cynical but I believe if we took away Frontline and the rabies vaccine and our own culture would very quickly shed the "fur baby" facade for a more practical approach to our cats and dogs. If I were worried about my children's nutrition, I'd be more than happy to expand the species of which I am willing to process roadkill into meat. I mean crock pot cat can't be much worse than baked opossum.

Foundation: A Desire to Eat Humanely



The author and a milk goat.

I was born in the midst of the stagflation of the 1970's.  My parents were young, under-employed, and just starting their life together. 

Mom was influenced by the back to the land movement and dad, raised in the post-war hunting culture of the Midwest, was able to take advantage of increased opportunities afforded by the rebounding whitetail deer population.

Consequently, my earliest experiences of food are intimately bound up with its provision.  My life started with lessons which fit the basic formula, "We owe respect and care for the animals which feed us."  More fervently than any other time in my life, I still believe this to be true.

In the decades that followed by parents prospered, our culinary opportunities expanded, and I gave the matter of food little thought.  In my early 30's, however, circumstances began to change.  The Omnivore's Dilemma and other works focused public attention on our food system.  My wife and I purchased our first home, housed on ten acres and I began to see opportunity in those acres.  Our first child was born and I began to reflect upon what lessons I wanted his home life to impart. 

I began to raise a few animals of my own and returned to the field as a hunter.  The more involved I became in the procurement of my own meat the more difficult it became to ignore the philosophical question, "Why spend money supporting farming practices which treat animals in a way fundamentally opposed to my own values?"




A cousin, feral food, and the author.

Cattle, chickens, pigs, they exist for our benefit and every aspect of their environment, and no small part of their genetics, is a consequences of human engineering.  We are as gods to them.  What remains to be asked is, "What kind of gods should we be?"

I evolved a desire to eat more humanely and began to implement practices which would lead me to fulfill that desire.  I measure my progress to that goal through two components: the economic impacts of my eating in the present and the character growth and addition of new skills which are the freedom which will fuel future choices.

Economically I aim to continually decrease my contribution to those aspects of the food system who in improving their profit margins by tactics which place undue stress on animals or otherwise restrain the animal from living according to its nature.  I accomplish this through informed commercial transactions with the industrial food system, raising or buying meat from local sources, and hunting.

This is the keystone to my approach: sheep need to be allowed to be sheep.  Cattle should be allowed to live as cattle.  Whitetail deer, bear, grouse, largemouth bass, lions, wolves, should be allowed an existence that comports with their basic natures and then dispatched as humanely as possible.  Some will become food for the masses, others will serve niche markets, and still others will be culled in trophy hunts or for population control.
  
Character growth is freedom.  I do not want to be a person so bound to his desires that I regularly fail to uphold the economic goal above.  From time to time I really want to bite into a Slim Jim or grab a Hardee's sandwich on the run.  I do not need them, I want them.  Strength of character is the freedom to resist desire.  In other words, I believe the ability to act according to one's convictions on any issue is a learned skill.  The learning requires the doing and I do that I might learn.

While I strongly believe in my values of animal husbandry, they are not the only values I possess and I am not yet willing to make them the values that rule all the others.

Three examples:

1.  I do not insist that my wife, children, or anyone else change their diets on the basis of my judgment.  Forbidding my children a ballpark hot dog or taking issue with my wife if she brings home a rotisserie chicken after a hard day will not, in the long run, further my goals. 

I am able to provide a year's worth of humanely raised meat so the family's annual consumption of industrial meat is far below the national average and decreasing.  If I were to attempt to force complete compliance, I doubt my family would be interested in carrying the experiment forward in their own time.

2.  Assuming I find it otherwise fit for consumption, I will eat any food that is about to be thrown in the garbage.  Food that is bound for the landfill has lost its economic impact and it is more honoring to the animal which was the source of that product to consume it than have it made into landfill.  This is about more than a co-worker's leftover pizza. 

My local meat cutters often have to pay for the disposal of excess fat trimmings.  I, however, can use those trimmings to make my own ground meat into sausage or render it into cooking lard, both are cost-free ways of expanding my culinary opportunities at minimal cost. 

3.  I find myself in agreement with Jesus about the importance of receiving the hospitality of others.  When he sent out the 70, he gave the command, "When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is offered to you" (Luke 10:8).  If a first-century Jew could put relationships over dietary rules, we should take seriously the question if we should too.

If someone cares enough for me to invite me into their home or to bring a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken to work, I am less interested in forcing them to constrict their hospitality to my values than I am in accepting their kindness.  The money has already been spent; my eating has minimal economic impact on the food system makes contact with another of my values: receiving hospitality with an accommodating spirit. 

Some of the author's Icelandic Sheep.

There have been improvements made in the direction of animal welfare over the last decade.  Cattle feed lots, or at least many of them are better than they once were.  Hog operations appear less distressing to hogs than they do to our human sense of comfort. 

Sometimes what is called progress, however is questionable.  Take for example the declining use of forced molting, a process which allows laying hens to produce eggs for a second year.  Without it layers become economically unviable after one year, cutting their life expectancy in half.  

Improvements have been made but more progress remains.  I still would not be able to bring myself to treat animals as they are treated in the industrial system.  If I would refuse to do a thing myself, what kind of man am I if I knowingly pay others to do for me that I might feign blamelessness? 

Two batches Mutton stock and a half jar of lard 

My alternatives have not been expensive, but they do require planning.  Some skills had lain dormant for decades and other skills were learned.  Equipment was acquired.  My character has grown so that I can joyfully eat as a vegetarian, or skip a meal or two when alternatives are lacking. 

Much of what I have done is within the reach of the vast majority of Americans, even those without access to agricultural land.  If have room for a $200 freezer and within driving distance of an agricultural area, you can take responsibility for knowing that your meat was raised humanely through simple visits to the farm on your way to pick up a side of beef at a locker plant.  I'm not talking about the farms who cater to organic, humane, gmo free crowd.  You can find a dairy whose practices approve, they will have beef available.  You can find a kid raising hogs for 4-H, he'll sell you a pig that won't make the fair.  If you pay for the processing, I am liable to give you my older laying hens.  My neighbor might do the same.  
The problem is not entirely with the industrial food system but how, as a population, we have allowed ourselves to become dependent upon it. 

I don't think the biggest driver for change will be legislation or even producer guidelines but for eaters to be a little less lazy about the acquisition of their food. 

I do not claim perfection.  I don't even know what perfection might look like.  I can conceive, however, of positive changes.  I desire that my short existence on this globe be defined by my own perception of what it means to live in right relationship with the living things which surround us.  Anthropocene.

My Bad Idea for the Weekend:

Nathaneal Johnson over at grist offers this essay on the morality of eating meat.  What I appreciate most is the introduction of the language of the virtues.  The idea has the effect of viewing how we eat meat less as a stain on the soul and more as a measure of excellence.  Johnson describes the position of author Paul Thompson's From Field to Fork.

Thompson’s solution is to treat vegetarianism the way religious traditions treat virtues. Christians strive to love their neighbors, but they don’t say that people who fail to reach Jesus-level self-sacrifice are immoral. Buddhists strive for detachment, but they don’t flagellate themselves when they fail to achieve it.

Thompson suggests that we should strive to do better by animals, but that doesn’t mean we should condemn ourselves for eating meat. There are lots of cases like this, he told me. “Some people are going to take these issues up in a way that other people would find really difficult,” Thompson said. “For instance, we all respect Mother Theresa for taking on amazing burdens, but we don’t say that you are evil for not doing it.” 

Living in the Anthropocene, of course I downloaded the new book to my tablet and look forward to digesting it this weekend.

Thompson promises to offer a good critique of my own position (coming in the first half of next week) which focuses primarily upon animal welfare.

Right. It’s hard to limit the “a life worth living is better than no life at all” argument to farm animals. Using the same argument we might raise children for the purpose of producing organs: As long as they were well cared for, ignorant of their fate, and painlessly slaughtered, you could say they had a life worth living. The clone gets a (short) life, a dying girl get a new heart, everyone wins! It’s rationally consistent, but certainly doesn’t feel right to me.

The essay, it does give voice to the animal welfare camp, and its concerns.  Temple Grandin does a such a good job discussing what animals want in housing and care that the essayist publish his entire interview with her.  In addition to discussing how some things have improved in the last decade she offers a very practical questions which should give the most fundamentalist of vegans pause,

Q. Getting back to egg-layers — I look at this with my human values and say I’d like the hens to be exposed to sunlight, and grass …A. Well, then it’s much more expensive. And we’ve got 25 percent of people in this country working minimum wage jobs and they gotta buy the cheapest eggs they can lay their hands on. I think eggs are a necessity — beef you could say is a luxury, but not eggs.

That space where philosophy and pragmatics grind against one another.  These are the good old days and I can't help but think that it is possible to live well, even in the technological wonderland of the Anthropocene.